Her head whips around. I look at her puzzled, wondering what, or who, it was that she saw that made her look away so quickly. My eyes scan our surroundings, looking for anyone I recognize, or rather, who she might recognize. A quick scan around the expansive room reminds me that of the roughly two hundred college students that buzz around the grill, I couldn’t name a single one of them. I can almost bet she knows almost every person here, although not personally. She is the most intense people watcher I have ever met.
“…get the nuggets or sandwich or maybe I should…” She starts talking, but I don’t take notice, my attention is still focused on the people around us.
My attention is snapped over to her when I see a tall man walking towards her. Her back is turned to him, completely unaware of his impending presence. I have never seen him before, and if she knew him, I would know him. She literally cannot shut up about boys, even if she only sees someone for a few seconds, within minutes she has his full government name and home address. Insane? Maybe a little, but she’s harmless at the end of the day, usually forgetting him within minutes.
The stranger taps on her shoulder and her head whips around to look at him. Her face looks as surprised as I feel when she looks at him, but I see a glimmer of recognition in her eye, so I patiently wait to see what will happen.
“Do you have a hair tie?” he asks, his hand still mid-air, still pointed and hovering above her shoulder.
“Um…I think I actually might,” she says, rummaging her hand into her right cargo pant pocket. “Oh my gosh, I actually do,” she says, pulling out a thick, black fabric covered elastic band.
There is a sense of pride I see etched on her face, but because she’s talking to a boy, one I know just by looking at him is exactly her type although she swears up and down, she doesn’t have one, she sets her face back to neutral. This is what she calls her cool girl look, meant to show a man she is never as interested as she actually is.
“Thanks,” he says, as he plucks the elastic from her fingertips which she holds up to him and turns to walk away from us. We both just stare at his retreating figure, caught entirely surprised, again, when he turns back around a few steps away.
“Love ya,” he quips, putting his hands in the shape of a heart and holding it up to her, a big, goofy grin on his face.
If I remember correctly, both of our mouths went slack, and our jaws dropped ever so slightly. He turns back around and continues on his way, disappearing down the stairs just outside the glass doors.
“Do you know him?” I ask.
“Define knowing him” she says, her brows furrowed in concentration, mentally trying to process the odd experience. “I know his name and I had exactly one conversation with him months ago. Does that count?”
“Does he know you?” I ask.
“Nope.”
“How odd.” I say.
“…and then he just walked off, like nothing,” she says, relaying this same story to now the second fresh set of friends we have. Every time a new person joins the table, we sit at eating our lunch, she insists on telling everyone the story over again.
I pull out my computer, having finished my food during her second or third run through of the story, and set my computer on the table in front of me. I look over at her food which remains mostly untouched. She is waving around her hands, recreating every second and every gesture as best as she remembers it. I notice that the thirty-second story has somehow turned into a two-to-three-minute story along the way, but I pay it no mind. I have homework to do and there is no point in ruining her fun. She made it abundantly clear that she never expected to see that man, or her hair tie ever again, which granted her the creative liberties to tell the story however she liked.
Knowing her, I reckon the story had turned to fiction in her head.
I open my computer and begin working on a chemistry assignment. A few minutes later I look up to see roughly half the table packing up their books and walking off to class. I wave bye to them, and they turn to walk off. I follow their retreating bodies with my eyes, using it as an opportunity to give my eyes a rest from the computer. As they turned the corner, another figure walks in the opposite direction of them, heading straight towards our table. I recognize this figure. I look over to see if she sees him as well but find her hunched over the chair she sits in rummaging through her backpack. By the time I process the words to tell her to look up, I am too late, and he stands in front of our table. For a second he just stands there, before he holds up his pointer finger with the black elastic wrapped twice around it. She finally looks up and is startled to see the man she just spent the last hour reliving the memory of. I watch her, having no interest in looking at him, her facial reactions never lie.
“I came to bring back your hair tie,” he says plainly. “I’m not sure you want it back now though.”
“No, yeah, I think I’m good,” she replies coolly, having regained her composure.
“Alright then,” he says.
There’s an awkward silence. For a minute we all just stare at each other before I decide to focus my attention back on my chemistry homework. She’s on her own with this one.
“I feel like I should explain why I asked you for it in the first place,” he starts. “You see, I lift a lot of weights, right?” I could’ve sworn he raised his arm and flexed his bicep at this. “…but I was recently watching a movie – you know Glen Powell – well anyway, he says in this movie that he’s ‘hot girl fit’ and it made me realize that I might be ‘hot girl fit’ instead of manly fit.”
I peek over to my left to see her reaction to this ridiculous story and roll my eyes when I see that she’s looking at him with those eyes she gets when she any hot guy talks to her. No matter how stupid he might sound.
“Right…” she says, sounding thoroughly unamused, contrary to what her face says. It doesn’t deter him in the slightest.
He continues on to explain in great detail that he’s taken up swimming in his free time between classes in an effort to get his cardio in without hurting his knees. A statement that could’ve been explained in a single sentence took up almost twenty minutes of seemingly unrelated details, yet as he was going on and on, I took the occasional peeks at her to see her eating it up.
“Well, that’s all I have to say,” he says, somewhat abruptly after finishing his lengthy explanation. And with that, he turned around and walked away.
The alarm on her phone hums softly from her side of the room. This is the sixth one in the last hour, and she lays completely knocked out in her bed. This alarm is her last signal to make it to her 8:00 AM New Testament class. A class in which she hasn’t missed a single time this entire semester.
I climb down from my lifted dorm bed and creep over to the side of her bed.
“Hey,” I whisper, as I touch her shoulder. No reaction. I tried again, jabbing her shoulder a little harder and repeating myself in a normal voice.
Her eyes slowly open and she looks up at me.
“Heyyyy,” she says, smiling sleepily at me, causing her eyes to squint so tightly they look closed.
“You’re going to be late for class,” I say, nudging her again as she starts to lose consciousness. She jolts back awake and sits up.
“What time did you get back last night?” I ask and turn around to walk back to my own bed. Now that she’s awake, I have no reason to be up this early.
“Um, around three or four I think,” she says as she rubs her eyes and yawns.
I stop and turn around to give her a shocked look. She doesn’t look smug about this revelation that I thought she would be, and instead I look at her face to see that her eyes are slightly more red and puffy than normal and she looks like she’s about to cry.
“Oh my gosh, what happened last night?” I ask.
She pulls her covers up and over her face and I hear her muffled voice say, “It’s over.”
“What’s over?”
She rips the covers off her face, exposing her fresh tear-streaked face.
“My life. My chance at happiness. Everything. Everything is over” she says. “He said he doesn’t want a relationship with me – that I’m not ‘special enough’ – whatever that means.”
“WHAT?” I say. “He said that? He said, ‘you’re not special enough’?”
She nods her head and sniffles, holding her tears at bay. My body is shaking with rage. How could he say something like that? What is wrong with him? Is he stupid?
“Are you going to be okay?” I say, trying to soften my voice.
She leans over and grabs a tissue from the floral tissue box on the desk by her bed and wipes her tears, regaining her composure.
“Yeah, I’ll be okay, I just need to sleep it off,” she says. “I’m sorry I came back so late last night. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
I know she’ll be okay when she starts apologizing when she doesn’t need to. ◆
Sierra Williams is a budding new writer whose previous works can be found in the 2023 Fall issue of MUSE Literary Journal’s “A MUSE ZINE.” Her typical work is focused on the editorial aspects of writing, having been a chief editor of MUSE Literary Journal for two years, and as a reader for Inlandia Institute’s “Inlandia: A Literary Journey.”
Pensworth 